Zenith Grant Awardee
Felix Binder
IQOQI Vienna, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Co-Investigators
Kavan Modi, Monash University; Felix Pollock, Monash University
Project Title
Predictive Quantum Intelligence under Physical Constraints
Project Summary
If we want to understand something about the world we have to carefully probe and observe it. For a physical phenomenon of interest – the weather, say – we can then form a model and use it to make predictions: when the sky is overcast, there is a higher chance of snowfall than on a sunny day. Arriving at such predictions requires memory and reasoning. We will only conclude that a dark sky indicates a chance of snowfall if we have previously experienced the two to be correlated. We understand intelligence as a combination of memory and the ability to think. But how much intelligence is required to make a good prediction? And what do we do if our intelligence is too limited to comprehend the full picture? In this research, we study how much an intelligent being can learn about the quantum world and what quantum aspects will remain hidden from us if we are limited in the ways in which we can interact with it – for instance, because our human senses are too limited to discern quantum phenomena with the naked eye.
Technical Abstract
Intelligence is the capacity to make sense of input from the external world. An intelligent being or agent is able not only to perceive their exterior environment but to interact with it in a structured way and to predict its future behaviour. In this research project, we investigate how much intelligence – here: the combination of memory and processing capacity – an agent requires to establish a model of a non-Markovian quantum stochastic process from observation. Putting the agent's capacity to probe the environment at the center of the description we use a quantum comb to describe both environment and agent. This allows us to derive lower bounds on the intelligence required of the agent in order to fully comprehend the process by means of a predictive model. In a second step, we consider agents who are constrained in terms of memory capacity or access to physical degrees of freedom and ask which features of a process, such as quantumness, they may still discern.
QSpace Latest
PressRelease: Shining a light on the roots of plant “intelligence”
All living organisms emit a low level of light radiation, but the origin and function of these ‘biophotons’ are not yet fully understood. An international team of physicists, funded by the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI, has proposed a new approach for investigating this phenomenon based on statistical analyses of this emission. Their aim is to test whether biophotons can play a role in the transport of information within and between living organisms, and whether monitoring biophotons could contribute to the development of medical techniques for the early diagnosis of various diseases. Their analyses of the measurements of the faint glow emitted by lentil seeds support models for the emergence of a kind of plant ‘intelligence,’ in which the biophotonic emission carries information and may thus be used by plants as a means to communicate. The team reported this and reviewed the history of biophotons in an article in the journal Applied Sciences in June 2024.